The Full Gitmo List

If you need a factual account of who was seized and imprisoned at Gitmo, Andy Worthington has compiled the definitive one. It's particularly apposite when you hear the current debate in which Cheneyites still use as a premise the notion that everyone in Gitmo was and is "the worst of the worst." Since the Bush administration released hundreds even they realized were innocent of anything, they had already conceded this, but won't, of course, publicly admit it (that would require admitting error which Cheney and Bush are incapable of doing). But this staggering fact is worth reiterating again and again and again as the disgraceful legacy of Cheney and Bush gets burnished by the pro-torture right:

I also hope that it provides a compelling explanation of how that same government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, established a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.

If you want another highly credible source for the same conclusion, read National Journal's exhaustive study, summarized by Stu Taylor here. Of 132 cases examined by NJ's Corine Hegland, more than half were not even accused of fighting the US at all. These people were those whom National Review's Cliff May wanted assassinated en masse by a missile.